Declan Donnellan To Do Donmar Antigone

Warehouse Productions, the commercial producing arm of the Donmar Warehouse who are currently represented in the West End by their production of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer at the Comedy Theatre (running to July 17), will next produce Sophocles’s Antigone, in a new version written and directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Ormerod.

The team of Donnellan and Ormerod, previously long associated with their now disbanded Cheek by Jowl company whose Shakespearean productions (including an all-male As You Like It), have been extremely prolific and international since going independent, with freelance assignments ranging from the original West End production of Boublil/Schonberg’s Martin Guerre to productions this year in France (of Corneille’s Le Cid, presented in French in a production also recently seen at London’s Riverside Studios and New York’s BAM) and Russia (of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, presented in Russian in a production subequently seen at London’s Lyric Hammersmith). They are also staging the new production of Coward’s Hay Fever, starring Geraldine McEwan, that opens at the Savoy Theatre on June 14 (following previews from June 9).

Antigone, which will open at the Old Vic on October 15 for a strictly limited season of 15 weeks, will have a short national tour, visiting Guildford, Bath, Richmond and Malvern, prior to London.

– Mark Shenton, Whatsonstage.com.